It was evening, and Jimmie Dale sat at a small table
in the corner of the St. James Club dining room.
Opposite him sat Herman Carruthers, a young man of
his own age, about twenty-six, a leading figure in
the newspaper world, whose rise from reporter to managing
editor of the morning news-Argus within
the short space of a few years had been almost meteoric.

They were at coffee and cigars, and Jimmie Dale was
leaning back in his chair, his dark eyes fixed interestedly
on his guest.

Carruthers, intently engaged in trimming his cigar
ash on the edge of the Limoges china saucer of his
coffee set, looked up with an abrupt laugh.

“No; I wouldn’t care to go on record as
being an advocate of crime,” he said whimsically;
“that would never do. But I don’t
mind admitting quite privately that it’s been
a positive regret to me that he has gone.”

“Made too good ‘copy’ to lose, I
suppose?” suggested Jimmie Dale quizzically.
“Too bad, too, after working up a theatrical
name like that for him—­the Gray Seal—­rather
unique! Who stuck that on him—­you?”

Carruthers laughed—­then, grown serious,
leaned toward Jimmie Dale.

“You don’t mean to say, Jimmie, that you
don’t know about that, do you?” he asked
incredulously. “Why, up to a year ago the
papers were full of him.”

“Well,” said Carruthers, “you must
have skipped everything but the stock reports then.”

“Granted,” said Jimmie Dale. “So
go on, Carruthers, and tell me about him—­I
dare say I may have heard of him, since you are so
distressed about it, but my memory isn’t good
enough to contradict anything you may have to say
about the estimable gentleman, so you’re safe.”

Carruthers reverted to the Limoges saucer and the
tip of his cigar.

“He was the most puzzling, bewildering, delightful
crook in the annals of crime,” said Carruthers
reminiscently, after a moment’s silence.
“Jimmie, he was the king-pin of them all.
Clever isn’t the word for him, or dare-devil
isn’t either. I used to think sometimes
his motive was more than half for the pure deviltry
of it, to laugh at the police and pull the noses of
the rest of us that were after him. I used to
dream nights about those confounded gray seals of
his—­that’s where he got his name;
he left every job he ever did with a little gray paper
affair, fashioned diamond-shaped, stuck somewhere
where it would be the first thing your eyes would
light upon when you reached the scene, and—­”

“Don’t go so fast,” smiled Jimmie
Dale. “I don’t quite get the connection.
What did you have to do with this—­er—­Gray
Seal fellow? Where do you come in?”

“I? I had a good deal to do with him,”
said Carruthers grimly. “I was a reporter
when he first broke loose, and the ambition of my life,
after I began really to appreciate what he was, was
to get him—­and I nearly did, half a dozen
times, only—­”